In a data network, quality of service (QoS) refers to the service provided for network traffic. A particular type of quality of service is “guaranteed service” in which the end-to-end delay for data transmission is guaranteed to be no more than a certain delay bound or limit. Guaranteed service is particularly important in services involving mission critical communications, including voice over Internet technology (voice over IP or VoIP), in which an Internet connection is used to transport voice data, and virtual private networking (VPN), in which the Internet or another public communication medium is used for transport of private network data.
In order to guarantee an end-to-end delay bound for data traffic on a data path, each node along the data path must guarantee a delay bound and the sum of the per node delay bounds is limited to the end-to-end delay bound. One data traffic capacity system that may be instituted in a node of a network is a token bucket. However, in order to utilize a traffic capacity system such as a token bucket model in a network and ensure that a delay bound is met, minimum parameters need to be established for the traffic capacity system. The required minimum parameters that will enable the system to remain within the delay upper bound are dependent upon the data traffic pattern that is encountered. In conventional network traffic systems, there is no efficient and effective mechanism for determining the minimum parameters that are required in order to meet guaranteed service requirements for a particular data traffic pattern.